Scheindel is one of the many tiny towns in the south of the Netherlands that could well be called a village. Public life is in full swing here only on the main square with the cathedral, and the households concentrated around them smoothly flow into the farms that are most traditional for this part of the country. Perhaps the lack of social activity was also due to the lack of appropriate infrastructure: until very recently, Scheindel could not boast of a sufficient number of shops and cafes. The Glass Farm, which includes a shopping and entertainment complex and a fitness center, is designed to fill this deficit. However, in the urban planning sense, this object is almost more important for the city than in the socio-economic one.
The fact is that Scheindel was badly damaged during the Second World War: in September 1944, he was repeatedly bombed, during which, in particular, part of the buildings in the main square of the city were destroyed. After the war, the ruins were dismantled, and the space between the town hall and the cathedral remained undeveloped for many decades. Already in the 1980s, there was an active discussion in the city about the need to fill this gap, but the matter did not go further than conversations and a competition of ideas. However, the future MVRDV founder Vinny Maas, who participated in that competition, did not forget about Scheindel, and in subsequent years he returned to this city more than once. Already after the bureau was officially involved in the creation of the project for the complex on the main square, it developed seven different options for it. There was even a theater building among them, but in the end, the Scheindel administration opted for a multifunctional center.
In order to organically fit the new building into the center of the old town, MVRDV came up with a very non-standard move. Taking as a basis the volume of a traditional farmhouse for these places, the architects increased it 1.6 times, and the facades were completely made of glass. True, these panels are not transparent: they are screen-printed with photographs of various fragments of real farms. Thanks to this, from afar it seems that the building is made of bricks and has a thatched roof - only the mysterious glossy sheen and deliberately enlarged proportions of the building suggest that everything is not so simple. As you get closer to the building, it becomes clear that windows with wooden shutters are actually the same picture as brickwork, and daylight enters the building through translucent "spots", reminiscent of those that appear in the photograph if you drop on with water.
According to the authors of the project, the "Glass Farm" personifies a kind of bridge between the past and the future, symbolizing the inevitable transformation of the village into a city - a transformation that has already occurred with Scheindel and awaits the surrounding settlements. In addition, the increased proportions of the building, according to Vinnie Maas, will help local residents feel like children again, when ordinary farm buildings seemed large and mysterious to them. In the future, the architects intend to support the game of scale with the help of swings and sculptures commensurate with the "Glass Farm".
